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Originally Posted by asaris
One point I wanted to make about the original post: At least in science, we don't have theories based on the one before. What we have is a period of time where one theory holds sway, a sudden revolution, and then a new theory holding sway, and these theories speak very different languages (perhaps even radically different languages.) Copericanism isn't really based on Aristotelianism; Relativity Physics isn't really based on Newtonian physics. Kuhn gives a great account of this in his book.
And, of course, the same is true to a much greater extent in philosophy.
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We develop theories about how something works based on what we already know about it, so that we can describe it to other people (the atom is a good time-course model of this). When we perform experiments and find out something new, we usually have to edit the theory or model to fit what we hadn't expected.
So making theories that are wrong is ok, as long as we're willing to realize that they're wrong when we learn new stuff. If we didn't come up with the original theories and share them with our peers, then we wouldn't be where we are today.